People are often wary of giving out their "real name," as it opens up too much opportunity for abuse. Examples of real names include home phone numbers, cellular phone numbers, or paging Personal Identification Numbers (PINs). Inherent in this is the problem associated with giving out a permanent name for associations that are temporary in nature. For example, consider the case of a limousine company and their drivers and customers. The customer contacts the dispatcher to request service. The company dispatcher communicates requests for service from customers to drivers, along with communicating specific information about the driver to the customer--the type and color of car, a designated meeting place, and the driver's name. The car itself may contain a mobile phone, pager or facsimile machine, but the company dispatcher would be wary of giving out the direct number to the car because the customers and the drivers might short-cut the dispatchers to negotiate outside the system. But, as a customer, one would be interested in having the direct number to the car to communicate with the driver to better arrange the connection. This is a problem today.
A similar problem arises anytime a dispatcher or the receiving party of a message or call wishes for whatever reason to keep private the number or address where one might be reached. For example, consider the analogous scenario where a mail order customer wishes to have a mail order form sent via email address but does not want to have that email address given out for fear of being inundated with junk mail in the future.
It would be greatly advantageous to provide a service, requiring little or no human interaction, for establishing a communication link between a caller and the intended recipient of a call, on a temporary basis, so that the caller is discouraged or actually prevented from contacting the intended recipient in the future.
Call forwarding by a message service clearly does not solve the problem of eliminating the opportunity of the caller to even leave a message for a called party, who in the call forwarding scenario, may choose to ignore the message, but will nonetheless receive it. In call forwarding, it is not that the caller does not have the right number, but that it can't, because of the intercepting party or service, get through. A caller can still be a nuisance if he so desires, by continuing to leave messages with the service, under either his real name or an assumed name.
Solutions for maintaining privacy or restricting access to records or the like material is well known. For example, it is common for today's larger companies to make arrangements with a vendor to allow an interested party, such as a loan mortgage company, to dial up a number and request to receive, for example by mail or facsimile, a mortgage applicant's employment data (salary, title, years of employment, etc.) simply using an employee provided "single-use" PIN number. The process requires no human intervention whatsoever, made possible by conventional interactive voice recognition (IVR) processing, and can even be set up such that the party requesting the information is billed for the service. The employee merely has to request a PIN number from the vendor, which he/she could do by placing a phone call to an automated PIN number provider, and which he/she provides to the interested party, together with the number to call for requesting the employee information. The rest is up to the caller, i.e., the mortgage company.
Another example is the popular "pay-per-view" programming facilitated by cable and satellite programming stations. In this regard, a viewer's access to scrambled signals is restricted to maintain privacy over the signals, unless payment is received for the right to view a desired program. Limited unrestricted access, and on a temporary basis, to the unscrambled signal or signals is possible. The viewer places a call to the programming station requesting--via automated touch-pad processing, IVR, or the like--access to a certain pay-per-view program. The programming station, in turn, transmits a signal to the viewer's home box which is used by the box to descramble, on a temporary basis, the incoming pay-per-view program. When the program ends, the descrambling code expires so as not to allow further descrambling of incoming signals. The viewer is then charged for that right to have viewed the unscrambled program.
The problem solved by the above solutions to the problem of maintaining privacy over records and cable programming, however, is altogether different from the problem of preserving the anonymity of a called party's device associated with a party that a caller wishes to send a communication to, or establish a communication link with, on a temporary basis only.
A solution is desirable which solves the problem of preserving the anonymity of a called party's device associated with a party that a caller wishes to send a communication to, or establish a communication link with, on a temporary basis only with minimum and preferably no human intervention whatsoever.